What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

I celebrate “What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life,” most especially so now that I, a retired high school and college teacher of English, have both the time to read and ponder Mark Doty’s brilliant analysis of Walt Whitman’s most well-known poem. How fortunate, also, that the book has surfaced during the shut-in of Covid-19. This book is a must for anyone wishing—especially when given the gift of isolation—to explore Leaves of Grass as a celebration of who you, the reader, has been and now is. Consider this from the Doty book as a response to Whitman’s line ‘I am not contained between my hat and my bootsoles’: “Begin with the body: water, vapor, air. You’re the shore on which an ocean of air is constantly breaking, in waves of breath. ‘Inside’ and ‘outside’ of lungs, permeable boundary of skin, eyes, ears, nose, holes in the body for substance passing in and out, no stable and fixed entity that is you, but a moving set of points through which pass water, air, light, food, parts of the bodies of others: their breath, tongues, genital, hands.” Each Friday during the growing season here in soil-rich southern Pennsylvania I shop at the local farmers’ market. Yet when I have prepared what I purchase for my husband and me until now I’ve never considered what Mark Doty does, the specifics summarized in these sentences: “All this was not part of me and now will be part of me, and so is in some fashion the history and culture of spinach: the long-held knowledge of growth, the history of seed-saving, variety, breeding and naming. The world enters us and departs, just as language and image and idea are imprinted upon our consciousness, considered, forgotten, passed on, released.” This book not only serves as a guide to Whitman’s poem but is also a brilliant guide to a unique view of who each of us is. So let me end with just one more sentence (I could have selected any of hundreds): “Our atoms came from the furnaces of long-gone stars, and swirled in galactic clouds; they crashed through the limbs of enormous reptiles and fountained up the vascular systems of huge trees, were Xerxes and Catullus, Nefertiti and Mother Ann Lee.” Surely you will gift yourself this book! And feel less isolated maybe.

American poets tend to claim themselves inheritors of either Whitman or Dickinson. And I am unapologetically in the Dickinson camp, I don't love Whitman's straggle, the endless list making, the self conscious image cultivating. Whitman is, though, the more democratic of the two, the more concerned with class and work and politics and, occasionally, the war that goes pretty much unmentioned in Amherst. So it was time for me to get to know him better. I'm glad I opened the conversation with this book. Doty gently points out what I've been missing, blending close readings (I mean, close for a popular audience, this isn't an academic critique) of some of Whitman's better work with bits of memoir that illuminate the author's lifetime entanglement with Walt the man. Other people have written about Doty's failure to really engage with Whitman's racism; it's not referenced at all until the book has progressed pretty far along, very glowingly, and I think the issue could have been handled more sensitively. But I am not one of those readers who needs to reject the work based on the personal failings of the poet. Racism and classicism are deeply embedded in American democracy, and figuring out how to reconcile them is not the project of this book. I will still prefer the Dickinsonian ecstatic glimpse to the tediously catalogued, but I came away from this book with a bit of new love for Whitman myself. And Doty is charming, although his former husband and lovers might flinch a little at the suggestion :)

This is a beautiful book, that delves into the life and poetry of America’s greatest poet. It includes interesting personal details about Whitman and his struggles as a writer including lesser known works. As the author delves into Walt’s life and work, he provides evidence of Whitman’s possible homosexuality. He also traces his own personal marital struggles as a young, married gay man. The best parts of the books relate to Whitman’s personal life, his relationship to his siblings and how his different jobs- printer, journalist, nurse inform the amazing depth and “ democracy “ of his poems. A beautiful work of art.

I am loving this book----incredibly detailed, incredibly helpful to understand meaning & nuances to Whitman's classic. This author is clearly a serious Whitman fan, deservedly so, as I too am becoming more of one.

What I found is a book that walks several journeys at once: Whitman's into becoming the first "American poet" (leaving behind European fuss and feathers); America's in developing its own language; and Doty's braided experiences of both love and physicality that celebrate (eventually) his love of other men. But the book is also a langorous paddle along the river of life itself, from childhood to maturity to the contemplation of the dead.

A gorgeous book. With deep and subtle perceptiveness Mark Doty illuminates and enlivens Whitman's transcendent poem: its spiritual insights, the beauty of the words and verse, the daringness of his art, the queer perspective that he both struggled with and prized, and that perhaps helped lead him to the experience and evocation of his sensual and profound appreciation of all things, interconnected and undying, throughout all time.

A heartfelt journey into the mysteries of creation one glorious line at a time. Thx Mark Doty. Thx Walt Whitman.

Discussing homosexuality with Whitman’s poetry is not what I thought the book was about, disappointed.